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“He says what we’re thinking and what we want to say,” a Trump supporter had enthused at a 2018 rally in Montana, echoing a century of enthusiasm for leaders who have the courage to “pronounce clearly what others only whisper,” as Margherita Sarfatti said of Mussolini.49
Trump’s February 2019 declaration of a “national emergency” over the “invasion of our country with drugs, human traffickers, with all types of criminals and gangs” reprised the language of Pinochet, Berlusconi, Duterte, and others.
As in the Franco and Pinochet governments, Opus Dei–linked Catholics have occupied positions of influence, like Attorney General William Barr and Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council.
The strongman brand of nationalism is founded on emotions of fear and victimhood. Stoking past and present grievances is as important as optimistic visions of what the nation could become.
Developed at the same time as the Hollywood star system, personality cults share an important quality of celebrity: the object of desire must seem accessible, but also be remote and untouchable.
At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.
the more skilled the leader is at this mediatized politics, the more his admirers see him as authentic and feel a personal connection with him.
What Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela observe about television’s function in Pinochet’s Chile—“It kept people home [and] created a direct link between the individual and the state”—has been true of all autocracies. Today’s laptops and smartphones have helped digital content to surpass television and radio in most developed areas as a portable propaganda feed.
The blatant lie can sometimes be effective, as the Nazis knew, but some of the most successful propaganda builds its falsehoods around a grain of truth. The perennial strongman message that foreigners are breaching the border to engage in criminal acts is one example.
Between 1927 and 1935, Mussolini appeared in over one hundred American newsreels and had his own nationally syndicated newspaper column, courtesy of his admirer William Randolph Hearst.
Like all strongmen, Hitler had worked hard on his charisma.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the
distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.32
Holding elections means that they are more dependent than ever on censorship and the manipulation of information. They still silence and slander critics, but also flood the media space with noise and confusion, drowning out messages that may threaten their power.
Today’s strongmen are well aware that every minute the public and the press spend on the outrage du jour is time they’re not mobilizing for political action or investigating abuses of power.
New authoritarians use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to target critics and spread hate speech, conspiracy theories, and lies. What today’s strongmen give up in old-style top-down synchronization, they gain in amplification and penetration. This includes messages intended to raise hatred for the press.
Trump departs from all previous heads of American democracy, though, in devoting so much effort to the destruction of the meaning of truth in the absolute.
Twitter has been for Trump what newsreels were for the fascists: a direct channel to the people that keeps him constantly in the news.
Presented by their personality cults as the ideal blend of everyman and superman, authoritarians make ordinary men feel better about their own transgressions.
The appeal of these leaders for many rests on their having the power to get away with things that ordinary men cannot, whether in the bedroom or in politics.
Gaining favor after periods of economic and political gain for women, the strongman seeks to reverse shifts in social norms that threaten patriarchy and the satisfaction of “natural” male desires.
For a century, women have been the strongman’s adversaries, along with prosecutors, journalists, and the political opposition. His machismo is not just empty posturing, but a strategy of political legitimation and an important component of authoritarian rule.
both men and women had to be subjected to the will of the leader, whose greatest pleasure was dominating and possessing
everyone around him—
Once he established dictatorship, he vowed to “drain the swamps” of Italy.
Fascist Italy was a laboratory for the divide-and-rule strategy that became a staple of authoritarian rule. Every three or four years, Il Duce fired more than half of his cabinet and undersecretaries to make sure no official felt too secure in his position. Becoming too competent or well known could derail your career,
He gave his ministers authority to build their own fiefdoms and encouraged them to compete for the title of most accurate interpreter of his ever-changing desires. Bureaucracies and agencies proliferated, often with overlapping competencies, producing “the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilized state,” as former Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich later charged.
All these “little Hitlers” built their own chains of corruption, often hiring those with handy criminal skills.
When violence escalated into mass murder, he would remain, for many, a “Führer without sin.”
He had overly competent or popular ministers monitored and sometimes sabotaged their work,
One-party rule and mass killing are now less common, making twenty-first-century leaders more dependent on propaganda and censorship to cover up their thievery and incompetence.
By 2018, one in six Russian business owners faced prosecution—a handy way to “put away the competition,” in Russia expert Karen Dawisha’s words.
Putin poses as a nationalist defender against “globalists,” but uses global finance to launder and hide his money. He and his associates have removed an estimated $325 billion from Russia since 2006. Some of that illicit wealth was likely cleaned with the help of the Trump Organization, given that Russian investors were its central revenue source at the time Trump decided to run for president.
More than a third of Italians who voted for him in 2006 said they were motivated by loyalty to him as a leader rather than to his party—a testament to how the strongman’s personalist rule ultimately harms his political enablers.
Through the end of 2019, Trump had visited Trump properties on 331 out of 1,075 days in office, meaning that one-third of his time was devoted to self-enrichment rather than governing.
As in other countries, the rise of authoritarianism in America has meant the end of accountability and ethical standards in government. Overall 100,000 civil servants left, retired, or were fired as Trump rid himself of experts and critics. Retired ambassador Nancy McEldowney compared the sweeping changes to a “hostile takeover and occupation.” A new Trump-era civil service employment application eliminated questions about real estate holdings, finances, and professional references. This made it harder to discover conflicts of interest and easier to hire those who can corrupt others or won’t
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His administration has had a record 68 percent turnover of high-level positions. What an anonymous official in his service called his “impetuous, adversarial, petty, and ineffective” leadership approach, full of reversals of policy decisions, obligations to sing his praises at meetings, and rage at anyone who opposes his will, is normal behavior for personalist rulers.
The Trump cabinet appointees who have kept their jobs the longest have understood that furthering Putin’s geopolitical aims is an administration priority.
What Godoy-Navarrete endured when her interrogators took control of her physical body distills the strongman’s need for total possession and his efforts to break the will of his people. Forty years earlier, the Belgian resister and Nazi captive Jean Améry had known this syndrome intimately. The torturer, he writes, acts as an “absolute sovereign,” claiming “dominion over spirit and flesh.”
However they use it, strongmen give violence an instrumental as well as absolute value. They believe that not everyone is born equal, and most also feel that not everyone has the right to life. Some people must be sacrificed for the good of the nation, and others simply get in the way.3
The authoritarian ruler uses all of his tools to persuade his people to spy on, lock up, and slaughter their compatriots. Propaganda encourages everyone in the country to see violence differently: as a national and civic duty and the price of making the country great.
Violence is at the heart of the authoritarian bargain between the leader and
followers who relinquish rights in exchange for economic gain and power.5
The strongman’s violence reveals his avariciousness for bodies and minds to cont...
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The US Army’s School of the Americas, founded in the US Panama Canal zone in 1946, taught torture techniques to right-wing militants from around the world.
By targeting mainly non-Whites outside of Italy and not persecuting Jews until 1938, Mussolini cultivated an image that he was a benevolent Fascist—an impression Berlusconi and his center-right government perpetuated.
The industrial-scale violence that marked the Fascist occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941) also remains unfamiliar to many.
The mechanization of violence that distinguished the death factories of the Holocaust reflected years of experimentation with a strongman problem: how to kill and dispose of vast numbers of people quickly.
Several vectors converged to create the climate of terror that marked Pinochet’s regime.
Cold War national security doctrines saw fighting Communism as a transnational endeavor. Operation Condor, the intelligence, policing, and terror consortium set up by Pinochet in Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile in the mid-1970s, put this credo into practice.
